From Martial Arts to Fitness

This is a guest post from Dave Chesser, the owner of the Formosa Fitness Gym in Taipei, and the writer of the famous but now defunct Formosa Neijia blog, whom I have have been corresponding with on and off over the last few years. It has been fascinating to see his evolution from the world of martial arts, being a student of the Chen Pan Ling line, to becoming an authority on the area of functional fitness and one of the leading exponents of kettlebells in Asia. Here is part of his story in his own words.  

I eventually evolved away from martial arts to fitness as I learned more about the things that interested me. Two aspects drove that evolution.

First, I was always interested in fixing body and movement problems using things like martial arts. So the therapeutic aspects of the arts were attractive to me. That’s one reason the Chinese martial arts appealed to me more than other combative forms. I always had a solid interest in fighting so that was a given focus in any art I studied. But CMA promised that and therapeutic aspects as well so I gravitated to them fairly quickly.

    

My early thoughts were centered on what each art specialized in and how those arts could be used to help people. Some people needed to calm down and arts like taichi obviously could be used to address that. Others needed more physical strength and hung gar fit the bill for that quite well. Later I explored long fist as a system of physical culture that opened the body and prepared beginners for studying any art. And that’s exactly why modern wushu uses long fist as a base art in China to develop the modern wushu athlete.

The obvious problem with this scheme was the plethora of arts that you’d need. If you’re going to fix people’s problems then you need a variety of tools to do that with but I started getting overwhelmed. I couldn’t do justice to all these styles and I’ve always had a bias towards simplicity anyway. So I started looking at how various people had synthesized the various styles and then distilled that knowledge down to a base of simple movements. I naturally shifted into looking more at qigong systems and Yiquan since they weren’t bound up with lots of forms to learn.

Then the second aspect came into play – I was forced to admit that some movements in nearly all martial arts were overly stressed with others not being stressed enough. This created muscle imbalances in nearly all martial artists, me included. For example, knee problems are rampant in MA due to the half squat level stances that nearly every martial art uses. From an exercise science point of view, this causes the quad muscles to become overdeveloped at the expense of the hamstrings, which are almost never used by people anyway. Overusing the huge quad muscles and under using the already weaker hamstrings is a recipe for disaster when talking about the knee. The quads pull the knee one way and the hamstrings are too weak to pull back. The result is knee pain.

So basically I came to the conclusion that martial arts by themselves were inadequate or ill-adapted to the therapeutic task. I had always worked out as an adjunct to my MA training and about that time I came across a book on weight training that described how to build whole body power through lifting. This was new to me and the exercise science it was built on – functional fitness -- was unlike anything I had ever seen. Functional fitness broke all movements down into categories like push, pull, twist, etc. and gave fairly precise ideas on how to use those movements to not only get fit, but in how to use the movements to fix people’s bodily problems. The more I explored this field, the more fruitful it became.

Then I discovered that kettlebell training mixed functional fitness and some very martial art-like ideas about skill and I was hooked. The Russians had detailed explanations for breathing while lifting and the line of thinking from, for example, “heng” and “ha” breathing from taichi was very clear. The ideas about thoracic mobility in the kettlebell jerk mapped closely with “bending the bow” theory from CIMA. The details of “opening the kua” were clearly given when I learned how to properly squat the kettlebell.

From there, the path became clear and I moved almost wholly into functional fitness and I haven’t looked back. I now make my living sharing my passion for skilled fitness with others and my knees have never felt better even though I now can squat 130kg seven times with no problem. The knowledge I’ve gained is fascinating and continues to build.